With filming taking place last year Montreal, New Orleans, Mexico and San Francisco, and with stills and a teaser poster for the already surfacing earlier this year, there has been a lot of guesswork about when we might see Walter Salles‘ highly anticipated adaptation of Jack Kerouac‘s “On The Road.” But as it turns out, he wants to get it right, and while the principal cast and crew may have wrapped things up a while ago, the director grabbed the film‘s star Garrett Hedlund and two took their own journey across American to snag more footage.
Piling into a ’49 Hudson with a tiny crew of five people in tow, Salles and Hedlund took off across backroad highways of the United States in a valiant effort to recreate the journey Jack and Neal Cassady took decades ago. The purpose of the trip was capture more second unit photography, taking in more of the images and sounds to add to the texture and authenticity of the upcoming film. Telling the Huffington Post it was “an unforgettable 4,000 mile adventure,” it seems the director and star are eager to do right by the source material.
In case you’re still playing catch up, Hedlund and Sam Riley star as protagonists Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise (surrogates of Kerouac and Neal Cassady), as the story follows the two on a journey across the North American landscape in pursuit of self-knowledge and experience. A stellar supporting cast is in tow including Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Sturridge, Steve Buscemi, Terrence Howard, Alice Braga and Elisabeth Moss for an adaptation that has been in the works for decades (Francis Ford Coppola was a longtime gatekeeper of the material).
So, how will this affect the release of the film (if at all)? Well back in May, it was revealed by the producers that “On The Road” was being readied for a fall festival circuit run and this was after the April shoot of additional footage. So we presume the key players knew about Salles’ plans and certainly he will have had plenty of time to get an edit into place. Either way, the project continues to build tremendous promise and while word on it has been quiet of late, it could be a sleeper surprise of fall festival season.
